The Presidential Difference
Book Forum

May 3, 2000

Transcript prepared from a tape recording

Speakers:	Prof. Fred Greenstein, Professor of Politics, Princeton University
	David Broder, Washington Post
	Dick Cheney, CEO of Halliburton Company
Project Directors:	Norman Ornstein, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
	Thomas Mann, Senior Fellow, Brooking Institution

Proceedings:

MR. ORNSTEIN: We are here to hear Professor Fred Greenstein discuss his new book, "The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style From FDR To Clinton," with some commentary and analysis by David Broder and Dick Cheney.

A word about the Transition To Governing Project, which is a joint project of the American Enterprise Institute here, the Brookings Institution, and the Hoover Institution. Tom Mann, of the Brookings Institution, and I, are co-directing this project, and we are trying, during the course of this campaign, to tilt the focus a little bit away from the obsession that we have with a permanent campaign towards a focus on governing, including the qualities and characteristics and styles of governing, getting the candidates, the commentators, and the public to focus on some of these things. We hope as well to improve the actual transition process itself, and joining with a number of others in this arena to do something about the nomination and appointments process, confirmation process, as well, for those going into the public service.

John Fortier, who directs the project for us, is here, in the audience as well. We have just a wonderful audience, including, I think as a tribute to Fred, a number of some of our most distinguished public servants, a number of former members. I'll just point out a few in the room. Alan Simpson, former Senate Whip. Steve Solarz is here. Bill Clinger, David Skaggs, Mac Mathias, and we have a number of people who've served with distinction in the executive branch, and others who span virtually every President that's mentioned in Fred's book.

I should also note that the Transition To Governing Project is sponsored and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Fred Greenstein is a professor of politics at Princeton University where he is known as one of the most prominent and distinguished scholars of the presidency, has written a number of books, including the definitive treatment of the Eisenhower presidency called, "The Hidden Hand Presidency: Eisenhower As Leader," has received virtually every award available to a presidential scholar.

This book is a wonderful book, which gives you just a terrific capsule description of the last six presidencies, and a look at the characteristics that matter, and he will be followed by, first, David Broder, national political correspondent for the Washington Post, who of course is known as the "dean" of political reporters and columnists, has been with the Post for almost 35 years now, since he was 18, before he graduated from college, even; has written for other newspapers in the past and has just published his--what is it?--sixth, seventh book?--maybe seventh book as well--"Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns And The Power Of Money." Also appears frequently on television and has been in this town through all of these presidencies, not quite back to FDR, I'm afraid, but for a long time as well.

And then Dick Cheney, who's chairman of the board, and chief executive officer of the Halliburton Company, served as Secretary of Defense, as a White House Chief of Staff, as House Minority Whip, and a series of other positions in the executive branch and in the legislative branch, and because there's no turmoil in the oil business at the moment, is spending at least a portion of his time, now, heading up the search committee for the vice presidential nominee to serve with George W. Bush, even though rumor has it that his number one choice on the list is Lynne Cheney. I'm not sure we can take that too seriously, although we should. In fact some of us would like to see at least two Cheneys on that short list.

I hope we'll discuss the characteristics that Fred has pointed out, that matter, that make a difference for Presidents, look at them in terms of the Presidents we've had, and look ahead, given the characteristics that we know we will see in the coming years, including an extremely closely divided Congress, this post-Cold War era, and so on--what characteristics should matter and will matter the most in the years ahead, that make the presidential difference.

So maybe if the three of you want to come up to the table, and we'll start with Fred.

PROF. GREENSTEIN: Well, Norm not only gives a terrific introduction, but he makes it unnecessary for me to read the first paragraph or two of my remarks. I am, indeed, as Norm suggested, going, try to step back from the specifics of the earlier sessions of this project, where there were, How would they govern analyses?, of great value, of the two insurgents who didn't make it to the nomination, and the two people who did make the nomination.

But asking how they would govern is, to some extent, begging the question of what should we be looking for in how they govern? Over time, in the course of steeping myself in the records of these Presidents, reading their published and unpublished papers, and the memoirs, and talking to people associated with them, it gradually came to me that there were a number of yardsticks or benchmarks that we should look at, and you think about the complexities of recent history. Think of the last two two-term, or, in the present instance, almost two-term Presidents--the Eureka College graduate, Ronald Reagan, and the Rhodes scholar, Bill Clinton, and you ask, now, what will each of them be remembered for?

Well, Ronald Reagan, who I think it will be forgotten when his obituary is written, that he may have thought that trees cause pollution, but it will be remembered that he redirected the thrust of American domestic policy and did that in his first year in the White House, and that in his second term, he was steadily, and skillfully and intensely involved in the first part of the winding down of the Cold War, and Clinton can make no such claims. So sheer intelligence, ability to do well in school, to become a Rhodes scholar, doesn't seem to "cut the mustard."

Well, what does? Let me go through six qualities, and as much as I love to ramble and ad lib, I'm going to read my remarks, so that they get done with, and I stay more or less on message, and then we can listen to the people who have some real things to say.

Yardstick one is the President's ability to communicate with the public--the bully pulpit. For a position that places a huge premium on public teaching and preaching, the modern presidency has been surprisingly lacking in talented public communications. Few of the eleven occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seem to me to have had anything like the facility at public communication that we see in many, many people in the communications field.

Now, I think the shining exceptions are, of course, FDR himself, who is the bedrock, and I think, still, a major benchmark for all later Presidents, the kind of--I think of him as the Mozart or the Picasso or the Toscanini of presidential leadership.

Well, there's FDR, Kennedy, although some people may find that some of that rhetoric had perhaps an edge of stridency to it--nevertheless, a talented public communicator, and of course Ronald Reagan.

Now chief executives, I think, as they come in, are in danger of being intimidated by having such extraordinary communicators and grammatists as predecessors, so I think it was worth their while to know that none of these people were born with "silver tongues." They really put effort into it. Even Ronald Reagan was not up to the speed that we're familiar with until his General Electric publicizing days in the '50s, when, in the better part of a decade on the road, he really developed his communications skills.

In the case of JFK, if you go back and play the tapes of his, or films of his early public presentations, for instance, when he was a 29-year-old member of the House, he's a rather shy, withdrawn individual, and it was the synergy and chemistry of his work in the Senate, with Ted Sorenson, that developed that style that is imprinted in everyone's mind, along with the great wit at the press conferences, and so on. Even FDR is described by Eleanor, back, when he was a state senator in New York, beginning in 1910, as someone who's presentations were halting.

She says, "I was afraid that he would never finish a sentence." Well, that's very hard to imagine now, and there's a danger, I think, of becoming intimidated, as I believe George Bush the Senior did. As many of you know, who were in that administration, he rejected speech drafts that attempted to make him seem to be another Ronald Reagan. It seemed as if knowing that he couldn't equal Reagan, he, therefore, in some respects, didn't try, and I think that that is an issue in the failure to communicate his genuine accomplishments in his fourth year, arriving, therefore, at a one-term presidency.

Well, public communication is an obvious thing. Something which is less obvious, and seems to me to be almost professorial in its technicality, is knowing how to run the inner elements of a presidency, and given, you know, that so many Presidents come from backgrounds where they're accustomed to "winging it," to being on the campaign trail, to being independent operators, as people on the Hill often are, the background of the presidency often does not provide the relevant background to structure a presidency well.

Now, to me, the President that any future President should look back at, and really warrants studying, is the former Allied Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower. Ike came in, he immediately constituted the presidency in what seems to me to have been a highly effective fashion. He introduces legislative liaison. He introduces the job that we now call National Security Adviser. He structures a very solid NSC process. He makes his National Security Advisers stay out of policy content, so that he's an honest broker, a particular approach to that job that I think is probably only approximated in later years by General Scowcroft during his Ford period, when he really does seem to me to have been a manager of the process. Ike made a statement, a year or two before his death, to an oral history interviewer, which I think is worth putting up on the next President's wall.

He says, "I've made many decisions of great importance in my life, and I know of only one way in which you can be sure to make a wise decision. That is to get all of the responsibility policy makers, with their different viewpoints, in front of you, listen to them debate," and he says, "I don't believe in bringing them in one at a time and therefore being more impressed by the most recent one you year. You must get courageous men of strong views, and let them debate with each other."

Now, on this question of letting people debate and letting them go up front, one of the things that became evident to me as I studied this process, was that there were some Presidents who simply were uncomfortable with vigorous give-and-take.

Nixon, with all of his quirks, really was uneasy with, and became, of course, such a withdrawn political anomaly. Reagan clearly was uncomfortable with vigorous debate, and I think that may have one of the things that led into something like Iran-contra, the low point in the middle of the Reagan presidency.

Then there's Lyndon Johnson, this phenomenal figure, and I'm constantly reminded, when I think about the importance of rigorous debate, of the NSC aide in the Johnson administration, Chester Cooper, who tells in his memoirs of how, at meetings on Vietnam, he fantasized that he would say to Johnson, that Johnson was moving in the wrong direction, and Johnson would go around the table in a very intimidating way, ostensibly seeking open debate, and he would say, "Now Mr. McNamara, do you agree? Mr. Bundy, do you agree? pointing at them, and Cooper would say, "When he got to me, in my head I would be saying, 'Mr. President, I certainly don't agree,' but I heard myself say yes, Mr. President, I agree."

So I think that that at the organizational level, it's not just the structures, but also the chemistry, and I feel that the Presidents whose leadership had at least the quality of putting together and effective and lively team, often are ones who are very well-remembered by their former aides.

Now many of the Nixon aides not only have ambivalent to negative memories of their boss, but they have the scars of the time they spent in prison as the aftermath of the Nixon presidency.

You find Johnson aids who, you know, say these complicated things--he was "brilliant but tyrannical," and so on. Lots of people who served with Jimmy Carter have less than totally positive feelings about working with this complicated and interesting human being. But I never met a Truman aide who was not totally in love with their boss. The same with Johnson, and the same with Kennedy. I'm sorry. I said with Kennedy. The same with the Bush people. Everybody surrounding George Bush just seems to have had enormous affection and respect for him.

Now, if my first two categories are the bully pulpit, one, organizing the White House two, number three is the obvious one of political skill.

Now, because you're likely to be a pretty skilled politician to make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in a sense, it might seem to wash out [ph], and one might say, well, you're in the job, the job does its--there's something about the role, the structure of things, that determines everything.

But there, it's illuminating and instructive, that when Jimmy Carter came in, having shown enormous skill at coming from being "Jimmy Who?" to being the President of the United States, he then became Jimmy, the sanctimonious, anti-political figure, Jimmy Carter who could come up with a massive and demanding domestic program, and somehow think it would be productive to cancel water projects in the districts of everyone on the Hill whose support he needed for this program, someone who thought in amazing anticipation of the Clinton health fiasco, who thought that the way to deal with the nation's energy problems was to have a huge bill composed, in secret, under the supervision of somebody who was not politically popular--not his wife, but, still--it was Schlesinger--and then present this multiple phone-book size piece of legislation to the Hill, without anticipating, you know, what the committee structure was, how it could be processed, and so on.

So we learn about the importance of skill, and any President who wants to see skill used to a T should just get a fast course in how LBJ came in, hit the ground, immediately, linked himself to the mainstream of the Democratic Party, picked up civil rights, invented the War On Poverty, which was something on the backlist of a potential Kennedy project, did so much so skillfully, produced so much domestic policy in his unelected "rump" term, and in the first year of his elected term.

But with Johnson you see all the skill being misused in an intervention in Vietnam, which is done incrementally, without signing Congress on, which is done with deception in that the open-ended intervention is announced at a midday press conference, in which the lead is that he was embarking on a peacemaking initiative in which he got Arthur Goldberg to step down from the U.N., to lead the way.

Well, all that skill without--and this is now benchmark four--a substantive and realistic policy vision. Johnson never asked how long this would take, what were our goals, when would we get out, how would we know we had accomplished our purposes. Of course three years later, there were over a half million American troops in Vietnam, and Johnson was pretty much a captive in the White House because of the level of protest.

Well, this then brings me to the last two which is the human being. The mind is said to be processed out of the two lobes of the brain, one of which deals with thought and the other with feeling, the left and the right.

Well, I think the cognitive qualities of the President, his intellectual strengths or weaknesses--his, and some day her--and the emotional qualities, and for these my observation is that, you know, certainly we have lots of bright people in the White House, but part of what struck me was that some of the very brightest people to be there--my reference earlier was to Bill Clinton, the Rhodes scholar, first in every class, who could read someone else's law schools notes and do better than they on the law exams.

But anybody associated with LBJ said this was one smart guy who could absorb every detail of a bill, and knew exactly whose district it affected, and so on.

Johnson, the great Bryce Harlow described--I'm sorry, I said Johnson--Bryce described Nixon as an "ambulatory computer," and I think, you know, that first Nixon term, where he published an article in Foreign Affairs called "Asia After Vietnam," which implied we wanted to get Vietnam behind us. In it, he said we've reached a par with the Soviets, so we have to find an accommodation.

There's a billion Chinese--there were only a billion Chinese then--who we can't ignore forever. By his fourth year, he's done all of these things. Enormous intelligence, political skill. But he also had done these outrageous and distorted things which one can now listen to on the Nixon tapes. I mean, totally unproductive and unnecessary to have a political "dirty tricks" political espionage, and if you're gonna have them, to tape record them, and then not destroy the tapes. So that it was the sort of self-destructiveness of the Nixon performance that got me interested in this project, to begin with, and then two Presidents who did not bring, you know, were not centrally involved in traumas as massive as the Vietnam quagmire and Watergate, but who, nevertheless, seemed to me to have shortcomings, and not just to me alone. I think Jimmy Carter's rigid--his rigidities as much, as brilliant and productive as he is as an ex-President, he did not have that quality that Justice Holmes attributed to FDR.

Remember, Holmes said that FDR had a second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament.

Well, I think each of the four Presidents who seem to me to be emotionally problematic are the flip of that, that they had first-rate intellects, or pretty good intellects, anyway, but second-rate temperaments.

Finally, what does one make of a brilliant human being who believes that there will be no repercussions to embarking on a sexual liaison with a young woman who broaches this by allowing him glimpses of her underwear. I mean, that has to be, you know, a hollowness, or a shortcoming. I think, in a strange and perverse way, it's reassuring to remind ourselves that we are governed by human beings, but it's all the more important that we look at the record, and that we look for criteria and ways of learning from the past, and I will now learn from the commentators.

[Applause.]

MR. BRODER: First, let me add my own word of appreciation, and commendation to Fred for this really wonderful book that for journalists, I think, is a great sort of checklist as to what we ought to be but probably are not likely to be looking for in presidential candidates.

I wanted to start by just putting a couple of footnotes on two of the characteristics that Fred mentioned. The second one, the ability to manage the White House and by complicity manage the Government.

The late Jim Rowe, James H. Rowe, who taught me probably as much about politics and Government as anybody I ever had the pleasure of knowing in my life--for younger people, Jim was a Montanan, came out of Harvard Law School and went on to FDR's staff as a very young man and stayed in Washington in the usual fashion to practice law, and became a great friend of both Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey.

Rowe once said to me that if the Lord said, "James, you have led a good life and as a reward I am going to give you one free amendment to the Constitution of the United States," he said, "You know what my amendment would be?" I said I have no idea. He said simply--very simple amendment--no senator of the United States shall be eligible for the Office of President.

[Laughter.]

MR. BRODER: Which I thought was remarkable considering his friendships with one senator who became a President and another who tried very hard to become a President. But he said they know nothing about managing anything. They have small staffs and most of them don't even use their staffs in the Senate very well, and they are really ill-equipped to manage the Government.

So, in his view, probably the closest replication, or preparation for that was the governorship.

The other thing that you mentioned, that triggered a thought for me, and it's a larger point I want to try to make, when you were talking about Jimmy Carter's experience in dealing with, or not dealing with Congress, which incidentally was accurately forecast in a very good profile that Don Oberdorfer of the Post had done about Carter's experience in Georgia, where, after first year and a half he had no relationship with the Georgia legislature.

But when I was interviewing John McCain for a profile, early on, before he became the real John McCain that we now know, the giant figure that he is, it occurred to me during the course of that interview, that there might be some similarity with Carter, and I wanted to ask the question, tactfully, and so I said, "Well, now, you know, we had one other President who was a Naval Academy graduate, did not have very happy time dealing with a Congress of his own party." The reward for that tactfulness was that he went "right into the roof," and he said, "Well, I'm not like that, at all," and so on.

[Laughter.]

MR. BRODER: But it struck me as interesting, that when we, in the press, were dealing with the McCain candidacy, the only dimension that we could find for that was whether there was some personal distaste for him that arose from his championing of unpopular causes in the Senate, and we never got to what I thought would have been a really critical question about the McCain presidency, namely, how in the world would he be able to govern with a party of his own in control of at least one house of the Congress?

Listening, Fred, to your list of criteria, and we need somebody with the eloquence of Ronald Reagan and the managerial skills of Eisenhower, and so on, and then thinking about what's ahead of us this fall, I think the instinct was we ought to go back and start over again, if that's the measuring stick for that.

We have two people, neither of whom can give a speech that can keep an audience awake for very long, but it occurs to me, in the communications area, that just as the whole communications system in this country is changing now, it is possible that presidential, the definition of presidential eloquence, or persuasiveness, may also be changing.

We know that the audience size for major presidential addresses has been shrinking. We know that the networks are increasingly reluctant to carry presidential news conferences live. We may be moving into a different era of communication.

Now, in the campaign, both of them found that they had to adopt a much, or informal style of communicating, to really be able to get a reaction from that audience.

I have no idea, how that may translate to the presidency itself, but I just raise the possibility that because of the changing nature of the communications system, they may be dealing with that.

The larger and final point I would make is one that you touched on, but which I would, in the current context, give even greater emphasis to, and that is the way in which our current presidential campaign system tends to separate presidential candidates from their own party, and particularly from their congressional party.

We saw a classic example of that with President Clinton in 1992, where he virtually disappeared. George Mitchell and Dick Gephardt--I'm sorry--Tom Foley was then the Speaker--for the course of the campaign, we never saw them in primetime at the Democratic convention that nominated him, and I think we may very well see the same thing in this election cycle.

I think Governor Bush has already discovered that it behooves him to put some distance between himself and congressional Republican leadership, and my guess is that as the campaign goes on, that Vice President Gore will also be trying to run much more as the legatee of Bill Clinton, the triangulation Bill Clinton rather than somebody who is there as a product of, and a ally of the Democrats in Congress.

We, in the press, not generally, evaluate Presidents [audio poor--unintelligible] presidency candidates, at all, with the criteria that you have in mind.

We assume that their ability to put on an effective campaign is somehow a surrogate for their ability to organize the Government and for all the reasons that you have stated, I think, well, it turns out that that is, at best, an imperfect proxy. I don't have a quick, pat solution for finding a different way to evaluate it, but I think, again, your work is very useful to all of us, as a reminder, what in fact this job does require.

MR. CHENEY: Well, it's hard to top those two presentations.

I, too, enjoyed Fred's book very much. Years ago, I'd read his "Hidden Hand Presidency" on Eisenhower, and had the opportunity, in my youth, to participate in a couple of conferences up at Princeton, that Fred was involved in, and I can wholeheartedly recommend the current book to everybody here today.

Just to follow on, a couple of things with respect to Dave's comments, in the communications area, and as someone who worked for Jerry Ford and George Bush, this question of your ability to communicate does get to be important. I won't deny, at all, that Fred has listed that as an important consideration, but, somehow, the system, I think, distorts the capabilities and capacity of some very good, capable individuals, because of--maybe it's the nature of the dynamics of our medium, of our communications system now, the way it works. The fact that the press coverage of White Houses tends to focus on conflict and controversy rather than get into substance.

We were always terribly frustrated in the Ford administration because we had firsthand experience, day in and day out, working for a man who probably knew more about the Federal Government than just about anybody else in the city. He'd been a member of the Appropriations Committee for 25 years.

He knew how many Park Rangers the Park Service had in 1953. He briefed his own budget in 1976. Nobody else, since Harry Truman--no other President had been able to stand up and brief the entire budget all by themselves. Jerry Ford did that in '76. He never got credit for his capabilities, and, I would argue, his cognitive skills and his knowledge of Government, partly because his style of communication wasn't as clear and as crisp, sort of didn't meet the standards of what we might define as, quote, "a good communicator."

I had a somewhat similar experience then during the Bush administration, and with a man who I believed, in terms of managing the Gulf crisis, for example, did as good a job as it is possible to do, or to find that anybody's done in recent times in terms of managing a major crisis. A commitment of troops, go to war, mobilize an international coalition, get our allies to pay for it, get Congress to approve it, to go through all the things that happened with respect to how the Gulf crisis was managed.

I thought it was a superb piece of work, and yet Bush will be criticized, sometimes, for his lack of vision.

The one area where I would take exception to Fred's coverage in his book, he's, I don't think, as--doesn't share my view, to the extent that somewhat more critical of President Bush's conduct in the office as well.

But I think a lot of this is driven by the nature of our communication systems today, as much as anything else. I don't mean to unload on the press here. It's not just a function of the press, but those of us who have an interest in politics, or watch the public policy arena--this is going to get me in trouble at home--Crossfire often tends to be the format we think of in terms of informed political debate, and that's not--we don't have a system that allows us, during the course of the presidency, oftentimes, to zero in on important considerations like organizational techniques and capabilities, and to do a better understanding, if you will, of how administrations and presidencies function.

I also think what we define as good communications oftentimes serves to cover up fundamental flaws, and I guess I would argue that, to some extent, that's been the case, and, certainly, during times during the Clinton administration.

Then you go back to the Kennedy administration and President Kennedy's great skill at dealing with the media and the public, and conveying a message, served--and I think Fred points this out in his book--to create some serious problems that had arisen as a result of the Bay of Pigs, and the way in which the Bay of Pigs ultimately contributed to the Cuban missile crisis, and a number of significant problems--sort of overlooked at the time, because of the communication skill of the man in the Oval Office.

The Jimmy Carter stories. It's safe, I suppose, in this day and age, to tell stories about past administrations. I remember well, the event that both Fred and David talked about, in terms of the energy initiative that President Carter brought to town, when he first became President.

I was then a freshman member of the House of Representatives and I always recall that he got a great deal of support from Speaker O'Neill. "Tip" really went to work and did everything he could to help pass that bill, and I remember being on the floor--this is my first term in the House--and the issue before us is whether or not we would pass the President's energy bill, and a very unusual thing happened.

"Tip" left the Speaker's chair and he went down into the well of the House, and he addressed the members on the issue before the House, which rarely happens, a unique event for the Speaker to do that, and he gave a tremendous speech that day, a very emotional moving speech. He talked about how he'd been a young man in the gallery on the day, in September of 1941, when the Congress extended the Selective Service System for another year, just a few months before Pearl Harbor, and "Tip" related this story in a way that, I mean, had everybody in tears, and then he went back up to the chair and sat down, and they turned on the voting machine and we beat him two to one.

[Laughter.]

MR. CHENEY: He was trying to sell a flawed product, and it was partly relationships, I think, eventually, that affected President Carter's lack of legislative success, but at the outset, it wasn't for wont of trying with respect to the way in which the congressional leadership signed on. They often have tried, in the past, to lend great support to the efforts.

If I look at the overall categorization that Fred's got, I think it's very good. I think it's very important for us not to forget, as we think about Presidents, and how they do, and certainly Fred mentions this as well in the early part of his book--it's the context, the times in which they govern, and there is no substitute, if you will, for being there at a time when you're called upon to do bold and decisive things, and I think, certainly, you always have to factor into the equation, when you're going to evaluate any administration or any President, that we're all--who get the privilege of serving in the White House--we all are enormously affected by the times in which we happen to arrive, and what the problems are that the nation has to deal with, and the President--it's important that we judge them within the context of the time in which they're there.

But I say, on balance, I think it's an excellent book and I would support it, wholeheartedly.

One final point with respect to your Transition To Governing Project, Norm. I think if there's a place where we fall down in terms of our transitional efforts, is that we fail to take the new team when they come on board, especially the National Security team, and get them up to speed in terms of the kinds of issues they're going to have to deal with, once they take charge.

A new President, President-elect comes to town, during the transition he gets briefed on the SIOP, the single integrated operating plan, how you deploy nuclear weapons, usually scares the hell out of him, and that's it. Then he goes on about the business of appointing Cabinet, putting together his White House staff, the outgoing crowd has briefed him and maybe his National Security Adviser on the SIOP, but we do almost nothing during that interim period of time to get the President and the senior Cabinet officials sort of up to speed on what it means to commit the force, what kind of forces are available, how fast do they deploy, how do you manage that whole process.

It would be useful, just to go back and look at history, at some previous case studies, and this whole notion of the transition and trying to improve the performance of administrations in the future, and there needs to be some method found or discovered that you can actually force them to do some of the things that the military does on a routine basis, which is to go through exercises, think about various and sundry problems and how you deal with them, and that's an area that I think would allow us, if we did more of it in the future, to avoid some of the "train wrecks" that oftentimes occur in the first year of presidencies.

I yield back, Mr. Chairman.

MR. HESS: Steven Hess, Brookings.

Fred, as you know, when I read the manuscript, I'm very, very fond of this book. Your six criteria are as good as you can find for those skills that a President should have. But of course a President is not going to have all six of them at the highest level of the scale, and it strikes me, as I think about your six, that there are two that stand out.

There are others, that we can compensate for. Organizational skills. If the President doesn't have it, the way you paint it, we can compensate for that. We can compensate even for cognitive skills. We can even compensate for communication skills.

But there are two, I think, that are incredibly important and really do stand out. The first is the policy vision. A President to aspire to something more than adequacy really has to stand for something.

The second is what you call emotional intelligence, ultimately, what makes the man, what is he all about, and that ultimately permeates everything in this administration.

So I would like to see some ordering of the skills as we continue to talk about--

PROF. GREENSTEIN: Well, I think the bottom line, Steve, is the emotional one. I agree, too, about the vision. Now by vision, I think it's important to distinguish between a kind of a gossamer vision, in the sense of being visionary. JFK generated a sense of youth and excitement and vitality, and I think it would be very distressing to some of the people who were so cooperative in giving the interviews about the Kennedy years, for me to say he lacked vision.

But he lacked a concrete sense of direction. He didn't think very much about the incremental additions to the American advisory force in Vietnam. He didn't think about how the Soviets would respond to his own rhetoric.

It was as if the rhetoric was important, in and of itself, and the dangers of presidential rhetoric, and the problems of perhaps the old-fashioned kind of rhetoric, came out in both Dave and Dick's comment.

I was really struck by the question of emotional solidness, or this currently in vogue notion of emotional intelligence as being particularly important, and especially so because so many of the eleven Presidents--a minority--but a significant number of them were brilliant as individuals, had enormous skills, in some cases even a vision, concrete vision, certainly in Nixon's case--but they had these flaws, like the tragic hero of Greek drama, something that undermined their performance, and that, in the final analysis, I believe is dangerous for the nation, given that the nuclear football still does follow the Chief Executive.

MR. BRODER: Let me just underline this point, because, in my old age, I've come to think, too, that temperament is a lot more important than native intelligence when it comes to choosing a President, and instead of worrying about what their college transcript shows, I expect we would probably be better advised, in the press, if we could somehow get access to their kindergarten report and see which of them had that nice notation on there--"Plays well with other children."

[Laughter.]

MR. BRODER: Because the trick, I think, in finding a successful President is--they all have ego, and they all have ambition, or they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. But it seems to me that the successful Presidents are people who are secure enough in themselves, in their own sense of self-worth, and self-identity, that they allow plenty of room for other people to indulge their ego and ambition in the political system, because it takes a lot of folks to make this Government of ours work. It was not designed as a one-person Government, even though we run presidential campaigns on the implicit assumption that one person makes all the difference in the world.

If we could somehow begin to gauge that capacity, or allowing room for others to indulge their egos as well, I think we would probably make better choices about our presidential candidate.

MR. CLINGER: Bill Clinger, a fellow at Johns Hopkins. In your discussion, it seems to me that the way we presently elect our Presidents, the campaigns that we run, are totally inadequate in allowing us to determine how good or bad they're going to be in your six qualifications.

Is there some way that we--how could we change that, so that they're gonna be more instructive? Because it seems to me that aside from the political aspect and the communications aspect, the other elements you talk about, we really have no way to judge how competent these candidate are going to be in those areas.

PROF. GREENSTEIN: I don't think there is a panacea, any more than there can possibly be a perfect President who could be put together with Lego blocks, who would have Eisenhower's skills and Roosevelt's eloquence, and, you know, all these little pieces. It would be like, you know, the jazz musician who combined Bix Beiderbecke with Charlie Parker, and Ornett Coleman, and wouldn't--it can't be done, and it wouldn't fit together.

I think, actually, maybe you're underestimating one of the things that a campaign can do, and that is, it does put the person under stress. This is the thing that Steve Hess brought out, a number of years ago, in a very fine book.

[Start side B.]

PROF. GREENSTEIN: --very good reading of Richard Nixon when he ran for governor of California. Now, admittedly, the part of it that was most revealing came just after he was defeated and gave his famous last press conference, and urged the press to give other people "the shaft", and so on.

But in that sense, I think the campaign does, at least potentially, get at emotional flaws, at people who go through the ceiling when they're asked innocent questions by distinguished reporters, and so on.

But there are other issues. Dave mentioned the notion of communication being perhaps made less formal, or less in a set piece. A number of years ago, a student of mine--I gave a paper for a conference on rhetoric, on Eisenhower's public communications. Now Ike is--leaving aside Kennedy's truncated presidency--the highest approval levels of all are from the Eisenhower presidency. Eisenhower's press conferences were notorious for the scrambled syntax, and his speeches were stodgy. He put a lot of effort into them but they were rather like state documents.

Well, most of the time, because of his other skills, and because he had so much political capital, they were not problems. He did crisis management. He made brilliant decisions about not putting American troops in Southeast Asia when the French were on the rocks in '54, but came an episode in which the Soviets lofted the first Earth satellite, the Sputnik aftermath.

His administration was attacked for ostensibly being behind the Soviets. This was the missile gap controversy. Now, in part, he didn't communicate that we were in fact ahead, because he didn't want to give away the fact that we had the secret U2 overflights.

But, in part, he had a certain disdain for the bully pulpit. He was, as I say in my book, "a hidden hand President," not the teaching and preaching President, and he just never got that point across, and I find myself wondering, now, given the nature of Eisenhower, could he have turned it around?

Well, I remembered something, which I finally got from the CBS archives, on the 20th anniversary of D-Day. In June 1964, he appeared on a CBS special with Walter Cronkite. They went to the Normandy beachhead, and Eisenhower, with enormous force and clarity, narrated the whole Normandy experience.

Now I think one way--I think Truman, who was very challenged as a communicator, once gave a TV interview on the White House and its history. He was charming and delightful, and what Truman's aides saw in his six-day-a-week staff meetings in the Oval Office was coming across.

So I think a varied communication mode would be consistent with this. Clinton of course has done it with his "Oprah" town meetings, but perhaps not as substantively as he might.

MR. : I don't think this issue rises to one of the six that you've outlined. However, it seems to me, Presidents, in my experience, have differed very substantially in how they deal with mistakes, and in their dealing with mistakes, they've either placed themselves in positions of being stronger governors, or weaker governors, profoundly, and that touches on David's suggestion of their character, and sort of starting off with their fundamental character, and then going on from there to their skill in dealing with such issues.

PROF. GREENSTEIN: I think that's a very good litmus. Is there a learning curve, or is there rigidity? Now people couldn't persuade Jimmy Carter to rehearse his presentations, you know, and so he would drone on with sentences that broke where the punctuation marks didn't exist, and when he expressed outage at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it was as if, you know, someone was probating a will. It was just, you know, absolutely flat and ineffective.

Truman, realizing that he couldn't give a good oration, when it came to '48, he learned to put aside his prepared remarks--alas, he sometimes misstated himself, rather embarrassingly, saying the Alger Hiss case was a "red herring" and so on--but he changed his mode into those famous feisty things.

Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs, while he didn't reorganize his White House along Eisenhower lines, he really restructured the flow of operations. They moved the really very brilliant and able Bundy from the Old Executive Office building to the White House where he could interact with the President. They put Robert Kennedy and Ted Sorenson in crisis management, foreign policy decisions, asking them to play a devil's advocacy role, and I think you see that improvement in the nearest thing to Armageddon in the history of the world, perhaps, namely, the Cuban missile crisis, where there was a lot of rigorous debate but also a lot of good judgment on Kennedy's part.

Then the White House that Dick began with. I think Ford has been enormously underestimated. I also think that if instead of thinking about presidential greatness, we say what we can learn, positive and negative, there are a lot of nice lessons from the Ford administration, and one is the way after, a month into that presidency, a month to a day, he shows up in the Oval Office with the cameras rolling, and pardons Nixon. Boom. Free fall in the approval ratings.

But did he meltdown? Well, partly, it tells you about somebody with character and sturdiness. But not only did he not do that, but he realized that he had taken the wrong lesson from the Nixon administration.

He thought that because of the Haldeman, Ehrlichman role in the Nixon White House, he should be his own Chief of Staff. He immediately sent out and brought Don Rumsfeld back from NATO, and Don got a solid political scientist as his backup man. Ex-political scientist.

MR. MANN: Tom Mann of Brookings.

Fred, I want to follow up on a point that Dick Cheney made, as a way of giving you an opportunity to draw up aspects of the book that you weren't able to cover in your brief presentation, and that really goes to the context of presidential leadership, the nature of the times. What do the times demand? What do the times permit?

I was struck, during the primary season, that Bill Bradley had a conception of leadership that was FDR style for all times. He is the perfect President, ranking high on most of your qualities. That style of leadership sort of is appropriate for these times, which seemed to be jarring to me, and struck me as out of synch. So the two questions are, Are some of these qualities more important in some times than in others? Is one of the qualities that we ought to look for in Presidents recognizing the nature of the times?

PROF. GREENSTEIN: Good question and it'd be hard for me to say no, thinking about it. But, you know, specifically, look at the period when FDR came in. He shows up to be sworn in on Capitol Hill with 25 percent of the labor force unemployed, no social safety net to balance--bail people out, bank failures abounding, farms being repossessed, farmers forming into quasi-lynch mobs to prevent this.

That was a run-up that might have led to the kind of end that we saw to the Soviet Union in 1991, and, indeed, if Roosevelt had been successfully--if the would-be assassin, who took a shot at Roosevelt and hit the mayor of Chicago, had not been jostled, John Nance Garner, famous for the pitcher of warm body fluids, would have been President of the United States, a figure incapable of rallying--well, this is sort of elaborate wander [?] into an assertion that these dramatizing communication skills were vital at that point.

They were, again, on December 8th, 1941, for the Day of Infamy speech. I think on those two occasions, despite many downsizes that came from a certain grandiosity on his part, such as believing he could charm Stalin, and believing that he could spring a transformation of the Supreme Court on the public just after his reelection in '36.

Roosevelt's times called for inspirational leadership, and, fortunately, he had it in his rhetoric and in his whole demeanor and presentation of self. That kind of drama, at a time like this, a time of prosperity, a sort of a Harding normalcy, kind of 1920's feeling, doesn't make sense.

You might say, therefore, that the vision category doesn't make sense, but if by vision we mean having a blueprint, then I think the amorphousness of the present world, and the complexity of the policy environment, I think makes the notion of having a sense of direction very important, and particularly in international affairs, where one senses that since the end of the Cold War, we've kind of drifted, opportunistically gone hither and yon, frittered our resources.

I mean, policy content is not my "thing" in this book. The book is dispassionate. It treats Presidents as if they were wildlife on the Discovery channel, not saying, you know, Is it unfortunate that lions eat zebras? and so on. That's how it is.

[Laughter.]

PROF. GREENSTEIN: But, still, you know, we've got problems, and I think, you know, having a blueprint is very important, and I think--now whether you do it yourself, or through surrogates, then having an organized structure to keep you on target, these these would be two things for the President--amorphous era.

MS. McGINNIS: I'm Pat McGinnis from the Council For Excellence in Government.

At our last board meeting, in November, we talked about the qualities of the next President. I wish you had been there, Fred. Steve Hess was with us, and others, and Elliot Richardson, in maybe one of his last discussions before he died, in January, talked about the qualities of the next President, and the two that he highlighted were a sense of history, learning the lessons of the past, and an imagination, a sense of--the ability to look around the corner and imagine the future, and how we might get there, thinking about some of the trends such as what's happening with information technology.

Could you comment on those, and, actually, the other panelists as well, if you'd like to.

PROF. GREENSTEIN: I think they'd be good, if I didn't want to run the risk of having a list that sounds like a Clinton speech, of the 74 most recent achievements of my presidency, I might want to add those categories, rather than trying to squirrel them into my existing ones of the thinking and feeling sides.

But of course one of the purposes of a book like this, which has a highly distilled history of two-thirds of a century of presidential events from Roosevelt's 100 days, about as far as Kosovo, would be to package a lot of history in the hope that the next President won't reinvent a disaster of a previous President.

As overworked as Santayana's aphorism, that those who don't know the past are condemned to relive it, that sometimes is the case.

I think the Clinton's relived the Carter energy fiasco, almost minutely. It's also the case that people just don't learn about the past, or they misunderstand it, and reinvent it. I think, in a way, knowing the past helps you to see around those corners.

MR. CHENEY: I guess I would come back, that I can't argue that those aren't important qualities, but I really think Fred hit it, dead on, when he talked about emotional intelligence. No two individuals are going to show up with the same view of history, even if they're read all the same books. They'll have different perspectives on it. I think that can certainly be helpful, but the capacity to sit in the Oval Office, to function under those pressures, to take the body blows that are part and parcel of the job, these days, and to maintain your calm and your poise, and self-confidence, and continue to do what you think needs to be done, as Fred's described it, I think out of all of the qualities we've talked about, that goes right to the top of the list.

MR. BRODER: A footnote on that. I've been thinking about the question that was asked earlier, about the presidential selection system and how it might not bear on these qualities that Fred has identified, and it strikes me--this is not a pander to you, Cheney--that the least neurotic President of those that I've covered was Jerry Ford, and it's striking, that he is the only President, got there without participating in a public campaign for the presidency.

[Laughter.]

MR. BRODER: He was chosen by his--he was elevated to the Vice Presidency by his peers in Congress who knew him extraordinarily well, and I think perhaps one thing that might help would be if, contrary to current trends, we could somehow build in an element of peer evaluation, by other politicians, into the presidential selection process, rather than making it entirely the public forum that is it today.

MR. ORNSTEIN: We might note that at 86, Gerald Ford is still not only going strong, but is better than ever, and may be on your short list--

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let's go to Steve, and then Al, and then we'll move forward to the front.

MR. ROBERTS: Steve Roberts from George Washington University. I do want to thank you, Fred. When I covered the White House, Fred was one of my constant gurus, and teachers, as were a number of people in this room, including Mr. Culvahouse and Mr. Korologos and Mr. Hess, and many others.

I want to pick up on this question, though, about--so many of you have agreed, that maybe of all these qualities, the most important is emotional temperament, emotional intelligence, and you haven't explored, how do we know about these people? I think everybody would agree that we're not going to learn about emotional intelligence from 30-second ads, and we're not going to learn about it from photo ops.

What is the responsibility of the press, covering the campaign, to help explore that dimension, which everybody agrees is perhaps the most central dimension in a President.

Often, when we try to explore the backgrounds of people, we're accused of going over the line of privacy, of invading people's private lives. But it seems to me that about the only way the press can help the voters understand this dimension you say is so important is, in fact, writing about the way people have acted in the past, made judgments in the past, the incidents that reveal their temperament.

So what's the responsibility of the press in helping reveal this most important of all qualities?

PROF. GREENSTEIN: It's a very great responsibility and it's not the responsibility of the press, I think, or anyone else in public life to pretend to be a clinical psychologist, or to put someone on the couch. Someone I have been very friendly with over the years, and who's 1972 book influenced my thinking, along with Richard Neustadt's 1960 classic, "Presidential Power," was James David Barber.

In fact, just after Watergate, Dave did a very--to me--very enjoyable group interview with Barber, who, alas, is not in good health these days, and the late Aaron Wildavsky, and a couple other people, and me, which I think appeared in the Outlook section, and gave us a chance to think, in some depth, about the presidency and its incumbents, and what we should do.

Now, Barber's view was that a President--the story of what a President was up to could be told from his early years. Did he come out of kind of a tortured family background? Nixon's parents were--you know, produced very decrepit role models. His father was kind of an angry querulous person who believed in conspiracies, but his mother was--set very high, almost unrealistic ideals, the person called "the Quaker saint."

So Dave Barber's idea was go back and look at their childhood's. But Ronald Reagan had an alcoholic father, and a lot of difficulties, but did a really classy presidency that will look better and better, over time.

So I think you learn more about people's recent record than their past, and that's what you guys do. You're on the bus with them. Early, in the McCain stage, you know, many people were in fact charmed by him, but the stories then came out about how had things been in his home state, and, now, I think it's complicated and demanding, but I think without taking on the role of untrained psychologists, you can report, in detail--also, I think a lot of what does not get well-covered is the fairly recent political career.

You read things about Bush in Texas. I may have missed the story that just tells you, in great depth, the story of his governorship, and now I've lost track of, who was it, earlier, who said that you could have told the Carter--oh, you mentioned--Don Oberdorfer dug up some stuff about Carter, you know, getting into odds with the Georgia legislature.

But I don't think we had a good account of Carter in Georgia. A lot might have been learned, including about how he searched for the segregationist vote in h is successful run for the governorship, after his initial defeat.

So I think just doing your job, but doing it on the recent record, and asking, I guess maybe in a little more detail, what's the human being behind that record?

MR. BRODER: At the risk of being a Homer, I have to say, I think, Steve, that this art form, which is a difficult one, has really been advanced by the work that my colleague, Dave Maraniss, has done.

PROF. GREENSTEIN: Yes.

MR. BRODER: Those pieces on Clinton during the '92 campaign, the expansion of them into "First In His Class" [microphone going in and out] gave us a pretty accurate clue, without putting him on the couch as a psychiatrist would do, as to what the strengths and the weakness were of his political personality.

MS. : Hi. [unintell.] I was struck, the way you [inaudible], the way so often, that we have our worst times with our most intelligent Presidents, and I wonder, sometimes, if there aren't some kinds of intelligence that can be counterproductive.

I remember a column David Broder wrote, where he unfavorably, I thought, contrasted the highly literal intelligence of Hillary Clinton with the more flexible skills of George W. Bush, and I wonder if we shouldn't be looking for a kind of intelligence, rather than just intelligence.

As a second point, I [inaudible] notice you talk about the querulousness of George W. Bush but I wonder what you made of the propensity of Al Gore to lie, repeatedly, about numerous things, and to keep on lying, even when refuted with the obvious proof of the truth.

It seems to me, also, in some other policy ways, he tends to make up his mind, and then factor in the things that support him, and try to exclude or deny the ones that don't. It seems to me he has a dangerous tendency to try to construct a reality of his own. That could be like the kind of thing that got Johnson into trouble in Vietnam.

PROF. GREENSTEIN: Well, I think it's maybe a long move from waffling during a political campaign, which is something that's sort of built into the job of being a campaigner, and getting you into Vietnam. You're picking this up from the TRB column that I did in this week's New Republic, not from my speech, or from my book, and let me say, I just don't have the depth of knowledge of either of the two candidates who were selected so early on this presidential election cycle, that I do from years and years of almost kind of "marinating" myself in the record of the 11 people who I write about.

My rough sense about Gore is that you're not seeing a deep underlying character flaw, but maybe some political weaknesses there, and I just don't have a good enough judgment of George W. Bush and I'm not sure that it's something that I'm prepared to get into.

I was persuaded by the New Republic to take a kind of "fast shot" at that in my column, but I do think the campaign is going to provide us with more and more information.

Let me also apologize, if I forgot part of your question. But I don't know.

MR. FELZENBERG: HI. Al Felzenberg, Heritage Foundation. We, at Heritage, have been having a series of events on procedures Presidents need to master to "hit the ground running," and one theme comes up that brings together, I think, three of Fred's points--policy, communications and elections, which was Mr. Clinger's question.

Several people who have worked in past administrations have told us that the most successful Presidents were the ones who articulated their goals very, very clearly and simply in their campaign.

Judge Rose [ph], in his memoir of Franklin Roosevelt, he traced more than 12 New Deal programs to speeches in the campaign. He gave the dates and the place. Whatever people may or may not have thought about President Reagan when he proposed a tax cut, surprise was not one of the reactions.

The next thing that came up was the same Presidents seem to have the best communicators--those two gentlemen--and I would add Mr. Kennedy--seem to have the speechwriter doing part of the policy, and Carol Gelderman, who wrote a book called "All The President's Words," talks about that. That Eisenhower believed you need a Chief of Staff and you need a Chief of the Speech, to see that all the people affected have signed off and are brought in, and things have been battled out, and the date is set, and a decision is made, and it forces the decision, having a deadline.

Most journalists know this. Some Presidents seem to forget it. The same with Sorenson. When he knew Kennedy had to give a speech, and wants the origin of the word quarantine versus blockade, and he puts Sorenson in charge of bringing people together, a speech emerged.

Her conclusion--I guess several of our guests--were that without that, those symbolic presidencies, those Presidents who may have run on integrity in Government--not that we're against that--or, in Nixon's case, planned to do this or that, without greater specifics, did not do very well and spent most of the transitions playing catch-up.

I wonder if the three of you have any observations to add on that, whether we're right or wrong.

MR. CHENEY: I might just say a word. When I was a political scientist, before I became a politician, I used to think you made policy decisions, and then you wrote speeches to describe the policy, and what I discovered when I got to the White House was that was dead wrong. That speeches drive policy. That in fact it was the commitment of a date certain, on paper, before a particular group, and a decision to talk about a particular subject, that forced the policy process to come to grips with and resolve major differences and decisions to get made, and I had it exactly backwards before I got there, and understood how it really worked.

PROF. GREENSTEIN: However, I think there can be a point in which--take the Kennedy example. Kennedy and Sorenson produced two speeches that were not vetted by his foreign policy team. They were the First Inaugural with its dramatic, but slightly bellicose-sounding language, and then, on January 30th, 1961, he gave a State of the Union message. He rarely had time to gauge the state of the union. It was full of the most dramatic language. The "hour of reckoning is here," the time of so and so. In that State of the Union, he called for major increases in military budgeting, a stronger military, and so on.

It was full of language that was very ominous about the Soviet Union. The Soviets had made lots of very welcoming gestures to him. They had been wounded by the U2 overflight in May 1960.

Khrushchev had gone out of his way to release some American prisoners, after Kennedy was elected, rather than at a point when they would have been useful for Nixon. He toasted the new administration.

But by the first week in February, the Russians were already getting very restive about the Kennedy administration, and it wasn't till the middle of February that Kennedy had his first meeting with his Soviet specialists.

He brought in a collection of the present ambassador to the Soviet Union and a collection of previous ambassadors, Kennan and Harriman, and so on, and they met, and, you know, they gave him some tempered advice. But by then he had allowed rhetoric to begin to rev things up, and then you had the mismanaged Bay of Pigs, which persuaded the Soviets of two things. One, that Kennedy had hostile intentions, and, two, that he was feckless, because he then didn't go on to triumph, Cuba, and that led Khrushchev to bully him at Vienna, and on and on.

Now rhetoric, communication is important, but not rhetoric that isn't tempered by having the relevant policy makers involved and signed off on it.

MR. ORNSTEIN: We'll take a couple questions over here, and then we'll wrap up.

MR. BROSNAN: James Brosnan, Memphis Commercial Appeal.

Is stress that is shown, tested in public through debates, or press conferences, or all those other means by which we practice, in any way related to how that individual handles stress in the Oval Office in a crisis or a situation?

PROF. GREENSTEIN: Here's someone who's been in the Oval Office more than once, so maybe you should take it.

MR. CHENEY: I'm not sure it does, and I'm inclined to think it probably does not, just a off- the-top-of-my-head reaction, and I can think of occasions when President Ford, for example, would lose his temper. He had a formidable temper, that you almost never saw. He'd learned to control it. He used to talk about what his mother had taught him, at her knee, in terms of controlling his temper; but he had the capacity. You could tell. He'd get red spots on his cheeks, when you pushed as far as you were going to push, and then it was time to back off.

Yet, in a policy setting, or when it was time to make a decision, he was very calm, very good, very collected, very interested in what others had to say.

I think my experiences with President Bush were much in the same vein. I never really saw President Bush lose his temper, and to try to tie somebody's emotional intelligence to how they would perform in debates, or how they would operate, sometimes, I think anger's a good thing.

Sometimes it's a normal human reaction and you would expect somebody to get angry, and perhaps even display that anger in the course of a political debate or argument. That doesn't mean they're unbalanced or unstable, by any means.

It's difficult, very difficult. Obviously, I'm not a psychiatrist or somebody who's knowledgeable about evaluating those kinds of things anyway. I think you just have to do--to come back to Steve's question--you have to do the best you can to ask questions, to probe, to see what their understanding is, to do what David and Fred have mentioned in terms of checking out their record, looking at what they've done, how they've operated in the past.

PROF. GREENSTEIN: Well, and their record may not be a whole cloth. Gary Will, who's enormously perceptive in his book on Kennedy, seems to suggest that the risky sides of Kennedy's foreign policy, the getting into the missile crisis, and so on, was continuous with what even in that era was a risky personal life, with an endless flow of sexual liaisons being channeled into the White House.

But you look closely at Kennedy's performance in the missile crisis, and elsewhere, in the Berlin crisis--there's a real divide between that personal life that's later become known, and the public life, which, for whatever its weaknesses, was very careful, very much concerned with not backing the Soviets into the corner, choosing a blockade rather than a sudden air strike, and then going behind the scenes to Drobynin to provide, sub rosa, reassurances, very cleverly agreeing to give the Soviets some missiles that we no longer needed anyway, and so on.

So I think you need to look at the whole pattern. Just as you need to look at the context of the times, you need to look at the context of the person's performance and career.

MR. ORNSTEIN: I think we'll--it's almost 2:00 and we'll cut it at that.

We have a tendency, in campaigns, to focus on parsing every issue position that candidates have taken, or to looking back at what illegal substances they may or may not have ingested in their youths.

What we've learned today, I think, is that there are a lot of other qualities we need to focus on a bit more. It's perhaps more of an art than it is a science, but, clearly, we can see some questions that we need to explore and I hope we will explore more during the course of this campaign.

I would urge you all to read and, even more, to buy "The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style From FDR To Clinton" by Fred Greenstein. It's published by the Free Press. As you read and buy that, since you're going to be in the bookstore or online anyway, you might as well get David Broder's wonderful new book that sets a very different context for how Presidents may have to govern in the future, in the age of electronic democracy, and initiatives and referendums, and both of these books may ultimately end up being the classic that "Political Education" is, by Harry McPherson who is in this room, which is still in print, in fact, even in a new edition.

I want to just briefly mention a few of the things that we're going to be doing, a little bit down the road.

Fred had mentioned Dick Neustadt. Richard Neustadt, over many years starting with Kennedy, wrote a number of transition memos for Presidents and potential, and putative Presidents. We have pulled those memos together, the best of them, with a wonderful reflection back, and look ahead by Neustadt, and a very interesting analysis by Charles O. Jones who edited and annotated them, and we'll be doing an event when that book is out.

We have another book on "The Permanent Campaign And Its Future," a collection of essays which Tom and I have edited. We'll have an event on that.

Following on the series of programs, How Would They Govern? which we did in January, which up until the President's video on Saturday night, I think was C-SPAN's best seller for the year so far, we will be doing a series of additional programs focusing on how these candidates would govern in foreign policy, domestic and social policy.

In June, we will keep you all informed. Thank you all very much for coming, and I thank the three of you for a wonderful--

[Applause.]

[END OF RECORDED SEGMENT.]